Public transport systems have to be adapted to the needs of the persons using said system. One of the major parameters for optimizing a public transport system is the passenger demand. Over the last decades, mass transport operators worldwide relied on passenger surveys to understand their mobility needs and change their planning and/or control strategies for the public transport system accordingly.
Recently the massive introduction of inexpensive automated data collectors such as the automatic vehicle location, ‘AVL’, and the automatic passenger counting, ‘APC’, enable to collect data automatically which then may be used for planning or controlling a public transport system.
Such planning and control methods and systems for public transport systems are for example disclosed in US 2009/0106101 or in US 2013/0197794.
Conventionally automatic passenger counting is used for analyzing the passenger demand. Inter alia automatic passenger counting data can be collected by smartcard data including stop-based or trip-based fares as disclosed in the non-patent literature of Munizaga, M. and C. Palma, Estimation of a disaggregate multimodal public transport Origin—Destination matrix from passive smartcard data from Santiago, Chile. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, Vol. 24, 2012, pp. 9-18.
A second option is to use vehicle's weight sensors as disclosed in the non-patent literature of Nielsen, B., L. Frolich, O. Nielsen, and D. Filges, Estimating passenger numbers in trains using existing weighing capabilities. Transportmetrica A: Transport Science, Vol. 10, No. 6, 23 2014, pp. 502-517 or as a third option to use video surveillance footages as disclosed in the non-patent literature of Chen, C., Y. Chang, T. Chen, and D. Wang, People Counting System for Getting In/Out of a Bus Based on Video Processing. In Intelligent Systems Design and Applications, 2008. ISDA '08. Eighth International Conference on, 2008, Vol. 3, pp. 565-569.
The analysis of these data of all the collection options includes a certain degree of uncertainty lying inter alia on the resource requirements to adequately deploy the corresponding systems on the entire network and fleet, i.e. financial related, which costs are considerably higher than automatic vehicle location data as shown in the non-patent literature of Nielsen, B., L. Frolich, O. Nielsen, and D. Filges, Estimating passenger numbers in trains using existing weighing capabilities. Transportmetrica A: Transport Science, Vol. 10, No. 6, 23 2014, pp. 502-517. For example to collect automatic passenger counting data RFID readers have to be bought and installed as well as the information system has to be bought and installed to adequately collect and store the collected information. Alternatively the public transport fleets with regard to the second option have to be provided with weight sensors or the stops—for the third option—with video cameras on every stop. Further to the second and third option software has to be bought and installed being able to transform the collected data in form of pictures into demand-oriented information for example disclosed in the non-patent literature of Nielsen, B., L. Frolich, O. Nielsen, and D. Filges, Estimating passenger numbers in trains using existing weighing capabilities. Transportmetrica A: Transport Science, Vol. 10, No. 6, 23 2014, pp. 502-517.